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/ 

Questions of the Day Series. — No. LXIII. 



WANT AND WEALTH 



A DISCUSSION OF SOME ECONOMIC DANGERS OF THE DAY 



EDWARD J. SHRiVER 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 

27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD ST. 27 KING WILLIAM ST., STRAND 

%\t limckjetboche t |)r*ss 
1890 



QUESTIONS OF THE DAY 



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G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, Publishers, New York and London. 



Questions of the Day Series. — No. LXIII. 



WANT AND WEALTH 



A DISCUSSION OF SOME ECONOMIC DANGERS OF THE DAY 



EDWARD J. SHRIVER 




G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 

27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD ST. 27 KING WILLIAM ST., STRAND 

%\t Knickerbocker |}rcss 
1890 



\X 



^ 



OC 



^ 



COPYRIGHT 1890 
BY 

EDWARD J. SHRIVER 



Ube ftnfcfeerbocfter press, 1Rew lorft 

Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by 
G. P. Putnam's Sons 



*, 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introductory i 

Why are we Poor ? 3 

scylla and charybdis ii 

Outright Socialism . ... . .14 

The Tariff Question 19 

Where the Money Goes . . . . .22 

Tariff and Wages 26 

The Single Tax 29 



INTRODUCTORY. 

The contribution in these few pages to a discus- 
sion which, in one or another of its phases, en- 
grosses so much of American thought to-day, makes 
no pretension to exhaustive treatment of the sub- 
ject. The author's one hope is that, through what 
he says here, he may aid in turning some minds to 
a consideration and more thorough study of the 
problem which confronts us, along the lines laid 
down by " Progress and Poverty," the great book 
from which his inspiration has been drawn. 

E. J. Shriver. 

New York, May, 1890. 



WANT AND WEALTH, 



WHY ARE WE POOR? 

It is a question that forces itself on our attention, 
and which cannot be put lightly aside. Not, per- 
haps, the actual pressure of privation for all, but 
for nine tenths of the people of America a galling 
sense that they do not get a fair return for their 
labor, and for almost every citizen of America 
the ever-present imminence of the danger that 
a sudden turn of ill-fortune may mean starvation. 
Our farmers are laboring harder every year, and 
every year seem to earn less ; our merchants battle 
with such odds that bankruptcy always seems only 
a few doors away, and overtakes the large majority 
at some time in their business career ; our working- 
men who labor for wages show a larger percentage 
of idle men yearly, and struggle under such grievous 
burdens that a fierce spirit of discontent is spread- 



4 WANT AND WEALTH. 

ing abroad and separating the poorer classes from 
their fellow-men by an ever-widening gulf. These 
are indisputable facts to him who will but honestly 
look about him : yet the nation, as a whole, is 
richer than ever before, and growing richer daily ; 
not only in the aggregate, but even in proportion to 
the population. The more men labor together, the 
greater is the product of each, and this is true not 
only of our country, but of all others. A generation 
ago the millionaire was a curiosity amongst us, and 
the tramp was unknown.; to-day both extremes are 
only too familiar. A generation ago the per capita 
production of wealth, the amount produced annu- 
ally, on the average, by each person was hardly two 
thirds of what it is to-day. Yet pauperism was then 
a thing that we heard of only in foreign lands, and 
grinding poverty so rare as to be fairly attributable 
to individual fault ; to-day there is no one so in- 
dustrious, so honest, or so deserving, that, once 
missing his foothold in the struggle for existence, 
he may not find it impossible to regain it. It 
should be easier to-day than ever before for a man 
to make a living, because the processes of industry 
are on so vast a scale as to have enormously in- 
creased the field upon which labor may be exerted. 
The return to every man for his day's labor should 
be greater than ever before, because the total pro- 



WHY ARE WE POOR? 5 

duction is greater as compared with the number of 
workers. The wants of mankind, increasing daily 
in both quantity and variety, should afford each day 
new openings for the profitable employment of 
brain and muscle. Yet what used to be an open 
field has become a privilege eagerly sought — the 
right to labor ! Our young men once selected their 
avocation as a matter of choice ; to-day they humbly 
beg for a chance anywhere, and grasp at whatever 
opportunity may be given them to earn their bread. 
The nation has gone on prospering beyond pre- 
cedent, but its citizens have found their struggle 
for existence growing harder and more precarious 
day by day. The few have grown steadily richer, 
the many have stood still or gone backward ; the 
amount of labor being done has enormously in- 
creased, but instead of this making a fresh demand 
for more labor, according to the law of nature, the 
opportunities for work have become immeasurably 
fewer for each of us. Our national development 
has been great, but it has been so ill-balanced as to 
continually threaten its own overthrow. 

For nearly a hundred years after the Declaration 
of Independence, it was only political questions that 
confronted us ; within the memory almost of those 
who have not yet grown beards, the burning issues 
have become social ones. We have boasted that 



6 WANT AND WEALTH. 

this is the land of freedom and equality ; but the 
man is not free who can live only at the permission 
of another to labor, and equality has long since be- 
come little more than a jest. It is little wonder that 
a spirit of unrest under the new conditions is 
abroad; the wonder is that the American people, 
who have never brooked tyranny from others, should 
not have long since broken the fetters which they 
have riveted upon themselves. Even to those who 
dwell in a real or fancied security as to their own 
hold upon the world's goods, there cannot but be a 
warning in the sullen rumblings that reach them 
from the social strata beneath them. There are no 
such natural differences between men as that one 
could by his own efforts, or even his own mastery 
over other minds, produce a million dollars a year, 
while another's best efforts will hardly bring him in 
three hundred ; and when artificial differences to 
this extent appear, it must cause discontent, how- 
ever vaguely or erroneously that is directed. A 
triumphant plutocracy has enslaved the vast body 
of our people ; and unless there is some relief, its 
weight will crush the bearers of the burden, or the 
uprising of the latter will wreck the Republic, and 
bring such chaos as France saw in 1 789. We may 
not yet be at the verge of the chasm, but each step 
brings us nearer to it, and to the day all thoughtful 



WHY ARE WE POOR? f 

men must dread when they remember how other 
civilizations have fallen. 

And in one sense it would be even better that 
America should suffer such a fate, horrible as that 
would be, than that it should go on further in the 
road which we have been travelling so fast in the 
last twenty years. For the bonds that give the rich 
their power are choking the life out of the nation's 
industry, and destroying the very sources from 
which they draw their wealth. If we do not have 
chaos, we must some day reach industrial stagnation 
— unless we cure the evil and avert both consum- 
mations. As civilization grows, no man produces 
all he must have for his own needs. He makes a 
surplus of some things and exchanges that surplus 
for the surplus of other things which other men have 
made. Yet we, in our folly, seek to forbid this ex- 
change by which alone can men live under present 
conditions. We maintain a preposterous tariff wall, 
such as China invented, and decree that men must 
pay a fine if they bring in goods from abroad, or 
else must contribute to the wealth of some one who 
controls the natural materials out of which similar 
goods can be made at home. By this tariff, we 
especially lay the farmers under tribute to a few 
mine-owners ; limit the possibility of the farmer to 
produce wealth, and decree that out of what he does 



8 WANT AND WEAL TIT. 

produce he must share with some one else. We tax 
commodities and industry of all kinds, and in every 
possible way discourage the production of the one 
and the existence of the other. If a man but im- 
proves his house, or his barn, or his store, we put an 
extra burden upon him as a sort of warning not to 
do too much of that sort of thing. And with it all, 
by our system of taxing unused land at a lower rate 
than land which is improved, we add to the tendency 
of all these taxes on production to make it more 
profitable for some men to gobble up the natural 
opportunities which are necessary to labor and keep 
them lying idle until the necessities of other men 
force them to pay more blood-money for their use ; 
rather than encourage them to put their capital to 
active employment. 

By all these contrivances, which in our blindness 
we consider a system of taxation that is to fall 
equally upon all, we at once partially paralyze the 
wealth-producing farmer and compel the workers in 
our hive to pay a constantly increasing toll to the 
drones. The owner of a mine, a forest, a city lot, 
an enterprise the use of which is a necessary factor 
in the ramifications of modern trade, such as a rail- 
road or a telegraph line — in short, of any thing 
created by nature, and therefore impossible of 
duplication by man, or erected by the franchise of 



WHY ARE WE POOR? 9 

the community with its accompanying feature of 
such forestalling of certain natural advantages as 
practically forbid competition — the man who has 
been fortunate enough to fall heir to such privileges 
or shrewd enough to seize upon them in advance of 
the public need, is in such position that he may 
safely look to his fellow-citizens to pay him for their 
use at an ever-increasing rate. And therefore it is 
that a few reap all the benefits of an increase in the 
production of comforts in which the many are en- 
gaged ; while the many are steadily falling behind 
in the race and sinking into a condition of serfdom 
that is no less oppressive because it is glossed over 
with specious class designations. Therefore it is 
that men are growing restive and looking for relief 
in such spirit that we may well tremble when we 
think of the future. But, gravest of all, we find 
here the reason why compulsory idleness is spread- 
ing its fell shadow over a larger percentage of our 
population every year. By taxing industry and its 
products, we place a premium on keeping idle the 
natural elements essential to industry, and thus limit 
its exercise. We often make it more profitable to 
work a mine at its smallest capacity for the sake of 
higher price in consequence realized for the smaller 
product ; we carefully prepare and manure the 
ground on which breeds such speculation in vacant 



IO WANT AND WEALTH. 

lots as curses all of our progressive towns and cities, 
denying the right of labor thereon to those who are 
ready and willing to work, until their need has be- 
come so great that the speculator can command a 
hundred-fold profit. Carried to its ultimate, this 
speculation in the gifts of nature would work its own 
destruction in the entire stoppage of industry, and 
therefore of the monopolists' returns. But while we 
are waiting for them to ruin themselves by their own 
greed, the lot of man is growing harder, the chances 
even to maintain life are diminishing, and poverty 
in all its various grades darkens the land more and 
more deeply as the opportunities for work are shut 
off. Is there no way that we can remedy all this ? 



i 



SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. II 



SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. 

Manifold have been the measures proposed for 
curing or alleviating the evils from which society 
suffers, ranging in their scope from those of the 
Socialists, who would have government do every 
thing, to those of the Anarchists, who would have 
no government at all, or those unconscious Anar- 
chists, the diminishing disciples of the doctrine of 
laissez faire, amongst whom alone are to be found 
any men who, having given serious thought to social 
conditions, yet hold that nothing more ails society 
than what might be called " growing pains." Such 
as these claim that for civilization to have its per- 
fect work in ameliorating the state of men, it is 
only requisite that organized society shall stand 
aside and do nothing, forgetting that when we 
would have a road clear, it is oftentimes as neces- 
sary to remove obstructions as it is to avoid placing 
others in the way. In the road to industrial free- 
dom there stands an obstacle which must be re- 
moved if we would keep on in the direct path. It 
is the control of those natural forces essential to 



12 WANT AND WEALTH. 

the production of wealth, the special privileges 
through which the few at once fatten upon and 
throttle the energies of the many, grant or deny at 
will the opportunity to labor, and often even dimin- 
ish the number of useful things that the world 
might otherwise have to enjoy, by holding land out 
of use to await a speculative advance in value, and 
thus forcing men to use less productive land than is 
called for by the present population and stage that 
the arts have reached. Arising out of the purely 
natural product of economic rent, land monopoly 
is yet a creature of human laws which have recog- 
nized private ownership, in what is rightly public 
property because of its necessarily limited charac- 
ter, and it is but true individualism to equalize 
opportunities by tearing down this barrier which 
we have ourselves erected. For while this remains 
it is only a sham liberty that we offer by striking 
off the other fetters upon trade and all productive 
enterprise. We must have courage to do more 
than merely keep off society's hands from inter- 
meddling with the conduct of its citizens, and must 
undo the wrong that has been done in permitting 
and even encouraging one class of citizens to build 
up private interferences with private rights. 

Yet it is not from too much, but from too little 
individualism that we have just now to guard. Re- 



SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. 1 3 

coiling instinctively from the theory that all is well, 
and that nothing remains but to let the ostensibly 
natural, but in reality warped, process of evolution 
work out its own results on the lines hitherto fol- 
lowed, the drift of men's minds has latterly been to 
fresh but more designed interferences with natural 
laws, to remedy those ills which are chiefly due to 
the unintentional interferences that have been al- 
lowed to rear themselves up unchecked, for want 
of wiser human laws. The incessant but futile 
efforts to regulate or repress those combinations of 
capital that are founded upon powers of monopoly, 
the removal of which would strike at the root of 
the evil, are so many cases in point. 

The' agitation for an artificial increase in the 
volume of currency, which swept over the country 
with such force only a few years ago, and which 
now seems to be gathering new strength, is another 
evidence of the socialistic spirit that insists on 
making things right arbitrarily rather than consent 
to adjusting conditions so that they will have a 
chance to make themselves right. It is a truism to 
say that men need goods and not the mere coun- 
ters which represent them. Yet there is a specious 
plausibility in the argument that these counters 
being needed for the exchange which is an essen- 
tial part of the production of wealth, their being 



14 WANT AND WEALTH. 

added to in number would furnish so many more 
tools for the stimulation of commerce. 

As a matter of fact, there is no lack of currency, 
and with the banking system so fully developed as 
it is in this country 7 , it is very doubtful whether 
currency can ever become so scarce again as to 
seriously affect trade. The abolition of the bank- 
check stamp removed an artificial restriction upon 
commerce by permitting the economical use of 
small checks, and thereby added enormously to the 
volume of our currency. So did the money-order 
system of the post-office and the express compa- 
nies ; all of these agencies furnishing, too, a cur- 
rency that is ideal in its elasticity. We do not lack 
currency, even though we do lack "money"; and 
that only because the obstacles which we have 
placed or allowed to remain in the way of men 
who wish to labor, prevent them from employing 
themselves to produce the things, title to which we 
call " money." These obstacles would be increased 
and not diminished by 

OUTRIGHT SOCIALISM 

or its toy annex, Nationalism, just as they are by 
the partial socialism of the protective-tariff system. 
The keynote of Socialism is the dogma laid down 
by Mr. Gronlund, that " it is just as natural for 



SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. 1 5 

healthy men to think and believe alike as it is for 
healthy men to see alike," a conclusion counter to 
all that we know of that human progress which 
results from the mutual friction of opposing minds. 
But without its acceptance Socialism rests on the 
fallible wisdom of those who may happen to be in 
authority ; for it is they who must determine what 
are the needs of all and how labor shall be directed 
to meet them. The probable supply we already 
know as to most articles, but the nature and extent 
of demand is a sealed book to the subtlest indi- 
vidual intellect ; and it is here that Socialism would 
fail, even were it not an insufferable tyranny. 

Born in a land where a personality is the State, 
it is hardly strange to find Socialism investing the 
State with a personality to which individual rights 
must bow ; yet so long as it claims to be the highest 
flower of the French Revolution, it is odd to find 
it contradicting the central doctrine of the men of 
1789 — that " the liberty of each citizen is bounded 
only by the equal liberty of all other citizens." 
Down at the bottom of the socialistic ideal and 
underlying the avowed fundamental principle that 
the injustice and misery which have been caused 
by the old limitations to human effort can only be 
corrected by creating new ones, is the notion that 
there are some men better fitted to direct the ener- 



1 6 WANT AND WEALTH. 

gies of all than is each man for himself to manage 
his own affairs. 

The socialists' pet illustration of society is as an 
organism that corresponds to the human body, a 
set of co-ordinate members working in unison under 
the direction of a conscious brain. The physiology 
here, as in Mr. Gronlund's assumption, that healthy 
men " see alike," is as mistaken as is the economic 
deduction sought to be drawn. Our physical or- 
gans work mostly through a system of reactions 
through unconscious nerves and involuntary mus- 
cles, by a sort of natural competition, such as is 
found partly developed in the existing economic 
order. The human body is a perfect instance of a 
healthy competitive system ; society is indeed an 
organism, but an organism with some of its mem- 
bers manacled. It is the restrictions which we now 
place upon the free play of social forces, the obsta- 
cles which we allow some men to plant in the way 
of others, that prevent our social body from devel- 
oping as healthy a growth as our physical bodies, 
not the relative freedom with which our social or- 
gans already work. We do not need to put metes 
and bounds to the movement of our social organs 
any more than to encase our physical limbs in an 
artificial machinery by which their movements may 
be more effectually controlled by conscious cerebra- 



SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. \J 

tion. Nor could we do so if we would, for the 
social brain which the socialistic ideal necessarily 
involves, and to a secret belief in which is almost 
wholly due the existence of its nationalist wing in 
especial — a superior directing class, whose ability 
to calculate and direct is greater than that of the 
mass of men — such a class does not exist. 

There is no need that mankind should give up 
its liberty to the State (which in practice would be 
the subordination of the many to the few) as the 
only alternative to the slavery under individuals with- 
out social responsibility which now threatens us. 
What the world needs is not more restriction, but 
more true liberty ; not a petty interference with 
individual actions, a directing and regulating of the 
extent and channels to which and in which we shall 
exert our industrial force ; but simply freedom to 
use that force on the lines where we individually 
find least resistance. There are no natural bar- 
riers ; we have only to take down the artificial ones. 
For individuals to control such public functions as 
a monopoly of transportation is to erect a barrier 
to the free action of other individuals, and there is, 
therefore, a reason why the State should resume its 
natural control of such fields of enterprise. But as 
to all else, it is only necessary for the State to see 
fair play, and by taking for common use the value 



1 8 WANT AND WEALTH. 

which accrues to advantage of location, to forbid 
that one citizen should stand in another's way — to 
remove its heavy hand of taxation from industry 
and equalize opportunities by subsisting upon 
economic rent. 



THE TARIFF QUESTION. 1 9 



THE TARIFF QUESTION. 

It was the reaction against socialistic regulation 
of individual freedom, and its concomitant effect of 
turning this regulation ostensibly for the benefit of 
all, to the profit of the few, that gave life to the 
uprising against Protection two years ago, and that 
has since daily added to its growing force. 

When Grover Cleveland sounded the call to 
arms for the greatest moral battle of the genera- 
tion, he must have been a dull-witted man who 
fancied that it was an ephemeral issue which had 
been raised. It had been germinating for years, 
but the time was now ripe for it to demand all the 
energies of the American people for its just solu- 
tion. Fond as we are of making comparisons with 
the past, the tariff question is an altogether differ- 
ent thing in kind as well as degree, from that which 
agitated the minds of statesmen in the last genera- 
tion in such moments as they could spare from 
consideration of what were then the weightier 
political problems. Then it was but little more 
than a question of good or bad taxation, involving 



20 WANT AND WEALTH. 

some inequalities of social conditions, as all inter- 
ference with nature's laws must ; but not of vital 
moment to the industries of a country in which the 
opportunities for creating wealth were so boundless 
and so free to all, that it made less difference 
whether abstract economic justice was attained 
than whether the purely political institutions of a 
new-born nation were properly grounded. 

To-day it has become a struggle between oli- 
garchy, masked behind the hardly less hateful 
pretense of an artificial direction of social force ; 
and such liberty of action as means life and death 
to the millions who are producing the wealth of 
the country. For nearly a generation it was so 
persistently dinned into our ears that only by 
shutting ourselves off from the rest of the world 
could we maintain a diversity of occupations ; that 
only by protection to American labor could Ameri- 
can wages be secured — that we came to devoutly 
believe in the superstition and to ignore the self- 
evident fact that even if these assertions were true 
we were yet cramping our efforts by forcing them 
into unnatural channels ; that industries which 
could only live by the help of perpetual wet- 
nursing were not worth having, and that by thus 
warping our natural tendencies we must inevitably 
in our moral life feel the repressive effects of a 



THE TARIFF QUESTION. 21 

system that was destroying our habits of self-depen- 
dence. The answer given to all this has been that the 
American laborer must be taken care of, and that 
the only way to do this was to shut out foreign goods 
and, by freeing domestic manufactures from foreign 
competition, enable them to pay higher wages. 

From the first it was a dishonest plea ; and 
it was indeed an afterthought invented by the 
beneficiaries of the tariff as an excuse for their 
being made a favored class. For the protective 
system was originally advocated in theory on 
purely socialistic grounds : the argument being that 
it is the duty of a nation to select the pursuits 
which its citizens should follow rather than to 
leave them to their individual volition ; and to see 
to it that its selection is respected, either by coax- 
ing or by coercion. Pure socialism, like pure des- 
potism, lays down a cast-iron plan for all industries 
under central authority, to which all citizens must 
conform or starve. That form of socialism which 
is miscalled protectionism theoretically seeks to 
attain the same object — the national direction of 
industry — by offering a system of bribes, through 
which some men are led to engage in pursuits 
which they would otherwise reject, the coercion 
here being on those who "pay the piper " rather 
than on those who do the work. 



22 WANT AND WEALTH. 

But just as Socialism proper must always be 
subject to the danger that the men temporarily in 
authority will manipulate the conduct of industries 
by the State to their own personal advantage, so 
Protectionism quickly degenerates even from the 
artificial ideal at which it aims, to a vulgar, selfish 
scramble for spoils, in which the successful ones 
are invariably those who have secured control of 
the gifts of nature in the shape of raw material 
which cannot be duplicated by labor, and meet 
therefore with no competition. 

WHERE THE MONEY GOES. 

We shut out foreign pig-iron, ostensibly that iron 
manufacturers may be offered such a bonus as will 
induce them to develop home production ; but the 
net result is that not only all industries using iron, 
but even the production of iron itself is crippled by 
the decreased demand consequent upon artificially 
higher prices — for the benefit solely of iron ore 
and coal-mine owners. With the best facilities in 
the world for making cheap cotton goods, we can- 
not meet English competition chiefly because of 
the protection given one or two owners of mineral 
deposits from which must come the dye-stuffs and 
bleaching powders needed to finish the goods 
for market. It is not the lumbermen who profit 



THE TARIFF QUESTION. 2$ 

by the tariff placed on sawed and hewn timber ; 
it is the lumber barons who own the forests. No 
laborer in a copper or lead mine earns or receives a 
penny more wages, nor is any smelting works the 
more profitable because we have decreed that these 
metals must not be imported ; but the mining com- 
panies pay princely dividends and dictate terms to 
all who deal with them. 

Many a time has the falsehood been exposed of 
this pretext that protection stimulates an industry, 
as in the operation of our absurd wool tariff, or 
when important smelting works on the Atlantic 
coast were closed by the imposition of a prohibitive 
duty on copper ; but perhaps the best illustration 
has been furnished by the controversy waged over 
the question whether Mexican ores carrying both 
lead and silver shall continue to be admitted free as 
silver ores or excluded by a new classification of 
them as lead ores. One set of mine owners in 
New Mexico and Utah find that the admission of 
these ores begins seriously to interfere with their 
own share of the monopoly which they and a few 
others enjoy in the lead trade, and vehemently de- 
mand that no lead shall be used in the United 
States which is not found in our own sacred soil, a 
large part of the lead-bearing portion of which they 
happen to have pre-empted. Another set of mine 



24 WANT AND WEALTH. 

owners in Colorado cannot enjoy their full share 
of monopoly on account of the peculiar nature of 
their ore veins unless they can get Mexican ores 
for admixture ; and so they throw to the winds the 
hallowed principle of protection, demanding that 
their business be granted the vivifying influence of 
free trade. Allied with them are all the important 
independent smelting works that do not control 
mines, in Kansas City, in Newark, in St. Louis, 
and elsewhere, who, if not forced to shut down, will 
at least be seriously hampered and compelled to 
limit their operations if denied access to so import- 
ant a part of their material. In all its boldness 
comes forth the horrid fact that it is not the labor- 
ers who make lead or even the manufacturers who 
employ them, who benefit by the tariff ; but only the 
owners of natural sources from which lead is drawn. 
And the reason why this is so is plain. If we 
force our citizens to buy lead of domestic producers 
there will always be enough works built for the 
conversion of lead ore into lead pipe or shot or 
sheets to create an effective competition, so long as 
the business of such conversion carries an abnormal 
profit. But there the home competition, which is 
the dream of the theoretical protectionist, must 
meet with a rude check, for when we pass from the 
mere manufacture to the acquisition of raw mate- 



THE TARIFF QUESTION. 2$ 

rial, we find that no matter how much the demand 
may grow or how high the price may rise, lead 
mines cannot be built like smelting works, and that 
the owner of the former will, therefore, always be in 
a position to demand that the smelter turn over to 
him his tariff plunder ; that, in short, monopoly 
will command mere industry and enterprise. Our 
fine scheme for forcing a hot-house growth of a 
manufacturing industry simply results in having 
the manufacturers plunder the people only to pay 
the mine-owners. True, prices of protected goods 
do not always rise to the full extent of the tariff 
upon them. If they are produced in such quantities 
as to exceed the home demand, and the producing 
interests are so many and so varied and the cost of 
production so low that the producers clash with 
one another, the goods may finally sell as cheaply 
here as abroad ; as at last was the case with copper 
after the American public had been mulcted for 
years to benefit a few Boston capitalists. And but 
few commodities will be enhanced in price to a 
greater extent than the duty on such form of each 
article as will not lose materially in weight in pass- 
ing through a further process of manufacture. 
Above that line foreign competition will be opera- 
tive through the possibility of importing material ; 
below the line, the material can rarely be imported 



26 WANT AND WEALTH. 

because of the freight charges on the percentage 
which is waste. 

TARIFF AND WAGES. 

But whether or not prices are increased to the 
consumer, or to whatever extent, the limitation of 
tariff upon universal freedom of action is always 
a hurtful thing. It benefits a few, already in enjoy- 
ment of superior natural advantages to the rest of 
the people ; it puts a bar against the liberty of 
every one else to do as he may please, and when- 
ever it raises the price, it directly reduces the 
opportunities for employment by diminishing the 
demand for goods. The evolution of the idea 
that the chief purpose of protection is to maintain 
wages, was not altogether the outcome of inten- 
tional dishonesty. Originally devised as. a means 
of forcing the majority of the people to contribute 
towards a bonus which should attract a minority to 
pursuits that they might not follow without such 
inducement, the favored ones, ashamed to acknowl- 
edge even to themselves that they were pensioners 
on the public bounty, invented the notion that it 
was for the poor workingman that they labored. 
That delusion is happily wellnigh exploded since 
the workingmen themselves are beginning to learn 
that wages depend on something else than tariffs ; 
but the kindred delusion that in some mysterious 



THE TARIFF QUESTION. 2J 

way the spoils of protection are distributed through- 
out the communities in the midst of which they 
lodge, seems more persistent. One would imagine, 
to listen to current discussion, that it really was a 
matter of grave concern to the people of Pennsylva- 
nia that its few thousand iron lords should be made 
millionaires. In this lead dispute we hear of the 
"vital interest" taken by the people of Utah, 
of Colorado, of Missouri, in the profits which 
concern a mere handful of mine owners. 

Were the monopolists all upon one side, and 
on the other, determined to wipe out the whole 
miserable imposition of a lead tariff, all the people 
who want to use lead or to transport it or to work 
it up and exchange it for other things, there would 
be small cause for surprise at the interest shown ; 
but even stronger than directly apparent self-inter- 
est seems to be the hope of getting a part of the 
swag that one's neighbor has captured. It is doubt- 
ful whether farmers vote to keep up prices on what 
they buy half as much because they are deceived by 
the nominal tariff on agricultural products as be- 
cause of the vague, superstitious belief in the 
blessings of a "home market," which are wor- 
shipped perhaps- the more devoutly because they 
are wholly a matter of faith. But as wage-earners 
have at last begun to learn that they get no higher 
wages and do get less work because of protection, 



28 WANT AND WEALTH. 

so farmers may yet master the lessons taught them 
by such bitter experience, that a country gains 
nothing by restricting its energies, and that ! etters 
upon trade will redound to the benefit of only those 
among its citizens whose control of some natural 
monopoly gives them the power to tax the labor of 
their fellow-men. Once that conviction comes 
home in all its fulness to the men whose indiffer- 
ence or opposition lost the first pitched battle in the 
war for freedom of trade, they will vote no longer 
to rivet the shackles upon themselves ; but however 
long such knowledge may be deferred, the cry for 
liberty has swelled too loud to be stilled again. 
For a time it was raised only by a few earnest men 
who with but little personal interest involved were 
seeking only to restore natural justice ; but so far 
has the curse gone that it is the oppressed indus- 
tries of the country themselves which have joined 
the chorus. They are groaning under oppression 
which they have just begun to feel, and hardly as 
yet more than dimly see the source of, and for their 
own preservation they must soon rise and shake off 
the bonds so cunningly devised, that have confined 
America's development, and which, if not broken, 
will drag us farther still along the road to national 
bankruptcy and industrial slavery that we have been 
travelling of late years. 



THE SINGLE TAX. 29 



THE SINGLE TAX. 

The battle for freedom of trade is set fairly in 
array, and it is not too sanguine a view to take, 
when we are confident that it can only end in the 
removal of the barbarous tariff that has so long re- 
stricted our national energy. But, even then, the 
fight will not be over, for domestic trade and in- 
dustry will even yet need relief from other burdens 
than those which it now shares jointly with foreign 
commerce. The question of landlordism, looming 
up to us so rapidly, will have to be dealt with, and 
that on radical lines. 

None but those who have been among the faith- 
ful to Georgism from its beginning can appreciate 
the sense of relief at the advance in public senti- 
ment which has already taken place on this subject, 
rendering it unnecessary now to remove such a 
load of prejudice as formerly, before one can fairly 
open a discussion of it. Definite knowledge as to 
what we expect to accomplish by means of the sin- 
gle tax is by no means as general as we would like 
to see it ; but at least it is possible to get a hearing 



30 WANT AND WEALTH. 

in which to impart such knowledge without having 
first to root out the impression that we are cranks 
seeking to subvert the social order ; and an enor- 
mous saving of energy is the result. That the 
movement should have made such advance within 
less than ten years after the publication of " Prog- 
ress and Poverty " and only four years since the 
New York Mayoralty campaign first thrust its doc- 
trines widely upon public attention, is doubtless 
mainly due to the prominence of the tariff question, 
an agitation in the same strain as that of the 
broader one for complete industrial liberty, though 
pitched in a minor key. 

But the shape which the tariff question has taken 
in late years is rather an indication of the groove 
in which men's thoughts have begun to move a 
step in the march of enlightenment, than in itself a 
cause of the rapid progress made. Back of it and 
deeper yet, is the ominous growth of Old-World con- 
ditions in a land where want was once unknown ; the 
simultaneous appearance of hopeless penury along- 
side of enormous wealth, where once all had at least 
the moderate comforts of life within reach, if only 
an honest and earnest effort were put forth to attain 
them, but no one was glaringly rich. The startling 
inequality of conditions, so far greater than any 
natural inequality of ability in men, the increasing 



THE SINGLE TAX. 3 1 

permanence of classes, might well awaken a sus- 
picion of injustice somewhere in our social order ; 
but even graver is the ever-growing army of unem- 
ployed men who are willing to work, but in the 
midst of a progressive civilization can yet find no 
work to do. A great danger confronts us, whose 
presence no thinking man can deny or escape ; and 
it has become a question not of mere expediency, 
but of positive necessity, how we shall effect our 
readjustment not merely to approach more even 
justice but to secure a constantly larger percentage 
of our citizens from the alternative of starvation or 
pauperism — whether we shall endeavor to secure 
more liberty or intensify the influences that work 
toward restriction. 

Our path has hitherto lain in the latter direction. 
We have, so far as we could, hampered trade by 
imposing a tariff on imports, which not only in- 
creases the amount of labor which we must furnish 
in exchange for foreign goods, but also increases the 
cost of domestic ones for the sole benefit of those 
who own the sources of raw material ; and by nar- 
rowing all our markets on account of high prices, 
directly reduces the amount of employment possible 
in either initial production or the exchange of goods, 
which is an essential part of production. We im- 
pose a species of domestic tariff by turning over to 



32 WANT AND WEALTH. 

a comparatively few individuals the uncontrolled 
power over means of transportation. We load 
down mercantile business with license fees, and if 
a man accummulates property in a portable shape 
make a more or less futile effort to take part of it 
from him through what we call personal taxation. 
We fine a man heavily whenever by either using 
his own labor or by paying out wages to others he 
erects a building or makes a fence, or paints a barn, 
or digs a drain. In every way that we can think 
of, we put a stumbling-block in the way of men when 
they endeavor to make useful things, which not 
only conduce to their own comfort and often directly 
to the comfort and pleasure of their neighbors, but 
also increase their ability to purchase the goods 
or the labor which other men have to sell. And 
while we thus discourage enterprise and industry, 
our taxation falls lightest of all on land which is 
held idle, and thus offers a direct premium on the 
withholding land from use in every growing com- 
munity, where it is often cheaper for owners of 
valuable land to wait until it has grown more valu- 
uable than to take the chances of immediate re- 
turns against the certainty of increased taxation if 
they improve. 

Perhaps the least justifiable of all our existing 
forms of taxation — certainly the most unequal in 



THE SINGLE TAX. 33 

its working — is that in accordance with which we 
seek to find out how much portable property each 
man owns and then assume to take a percentage of 
it from him. This is a tax which is so transparently 
unwarrantable that men have no scruple about 
evading it, and do evade it whenever their property 
is large enough to make the trouble worth taking ; 
so that it falls only on those who have least. But 
every tax on goods or on trade or improvements 
makes their production so much the more difficult 
and reduces the quantity of things essential to 
human life and enjoyment. When a man makes a 
useful thing more than he needs for his own con- 
sumption, he directly adds to the comfort of the 
human race, for he has in that thing the power to 
buy the product of some other man's labor, for 
which otherwise there would be no market. All 
men in this sense are co-workers, satisfying their 
own and others' wants through an infinite chain of 
exchanges, which therefore become a necessary 
step in the process of production. Every bar to 
these exchanges, every burden laid upon any part 
of the work of production, every check — whether 
by taxation or by denial of any of the factors of 
production — to the employment of labor, reduces 
the number of exchangeable things, and therefore 
the possibility for each man to satisfy his wants 



34 WANT AND WEALTH. 

in a civilization where no man produces only for 
himself, and all must consume some of the prod- 
ucts of others. 

Land is the prime factor of production, the one 
thing without the use of which not one of its pro- 
cesses can be accomplished. So long as any land 
within reach remains unappropriated, an unem- 
ployed man need not starve ; but that condition, 
with which this country was blessed a generation 
ago, and by reason of which unavoidable pauperism 
was unknown amongst us, has passed away. The 
flood of emigration which brought an added power 
of production with each new immigrant so long as 
it found freedom of opportunity to labor, has not 
filled our country ; but, to all practical purposes, the 
free land has all been taken up. It is not all used ; 
much of it is held idle until the demand for it has 
become so much more urgent that an even higher 
price than now will be paid for its use. And for that 
reason chiefly men seek employment in vain, being 
forbidden the chance to employ themselves, and 
other men who have produced goods can find no 
market for them, because those who would be 
buyers are given no opportunity to employ their 
labor in rendering such services as would furnish 
the means of payment. 

The Single Tax when in operation will cure this 



THE SINGLE TAX. 35 

congestion of social energies, whose effects we dub 
overproduction of wealth, in face of the fact that 
men and women and children are suffering on every 
hand for want of useful things. What Henry 
George has proposed and his followers now advocate, 
is that all taxes bearing directly or indirectly upon in- 
dustry through assessment on its products (which 
include all tariff taxes, all license fees, all personal- 
property taxation and the fines on improvement that 
are levied in the guise of taxes upon buildings or 
other products of labor, which are commonly but 
erroneously classed with land under the head of 
real estate) and to substitute for these a tax upon 
land according to its annual value, which must 
eventually absorb practically the whole amount 
which men are willing to pay for its use. By this 
system, productive industry will be relieved of the 
checks now placed upon its exercise, the restric- 
tions removed which block the freedom of exchange ; 
the creation of wealth will be fostered rather than 
hindered as at present, for no man can afford to 
hold even partially idle land that is needed for the 
employment of labor, and all men will therefore 
have free access to the bounties of nature. 

For it is no mere shifting of burdens that is pro- 
posed. Men will always pay for the use of land 
either as rental or in a capitalized price of purchase, 



36 WANT AND WEALTH. 

just as much as is equal to the productive power of 
such land over and above the least productive land 
within reach that is used at all. Not necessarily 
such productive power as is shown by fertility ; for 
it is rarely indeed that the agricultural use of land 
will bring any rental value and therefore rarely that 
farming land will be taxed as heavily under the 
single tax even as it is now. But in cities where 
great numbers of men are gathered together or in 
the spots where the laboratory of nature has depos- 
ited its wealth of mineral resources, the use of land 
is a valuable thing, for which payment is gladly 
given. It is given now to individuals, it is even 
made larger than it would otherwise be by tariff 
laws which raise the price of metallic ores, of coal 
or lumber ; and where a tax bears on commodities, 
that is paid in addition by the consumers of them. 
Of this latter they will be relieved by the single tax, 
through which the State will subsist on its natural 
income, the rental value of land and not upon an un- 
evenly collected moiety of the labors of its citizens. 
In this it will conform not only to expediency, 
but also to abstract justice. For this annual rental 
value, this percentage of the total product which is 
now paid over by those who use land to those who 
own it, represents nothing that the latter have done. 
It is simply the price of a privilege of which they are 



THE SINGLE TAX. 27 

so fortunate as to have become possessed. It can- 
not rightly be said to belong to any individual, for 
if we recognize the self-evident truth that all men 
have equal natural right to use of the land which, 
being created by none, is the common heritage of 
all, we must see that it is only fair that when one 
man occupies a portion of land which, either through 
superior natural advantages or by reason of the 
proximity of other men, will yield him a better 
income with the same amount of exertion than can 
be secured elsewhere, he should pay the difference 
into the common fund. He is forced to pay it even 
under our present system, by the inexorable natural 
law, but it is not to the rightful joint owners, 
but to some one who has appropriated some of the 
common property. 

Yet this question of comparative justice is not 
after all the really important point. It is an evil 
thing that a few should grow enormously rich by 
receiving a portion of the results of others' labor 
without rendering any equivalent therefor ; but an 
even greater evil is that the expectation of in- 
creased returns, wherever population and trade are 
increasing, leads men so often to withhold it from 
use, and thus creates an artificial scarcity of national 
resources just where they are the most needed, a 
condition which is made possible only by a system 



38 WANT AND WEALTH. 

of taxing industry instead of monopoly, and which 
will be destroyed by a system decreeing that, 
whether used or not, the value of land for use must 
be paid into the common treasury. It is clear that 
in that event no land will lie idle that is needed, and 
that since there will then be ample opportunities for 
labor open to all, there can be no possibility in this 
magnificent civilization of ours, but that each of us 
can secure the comforts of life. 

The time has come when we must make our 
choice between freedom along this line and such 
regulation as is contemplated by the various forms 
of socialism, under whichever name they appear. 
Land values are ultimately the creature of natural 
forces, proximately of the communities to which, 
under Mr. George's plan, they will accrue ; and if 
we do not conform our institutions to this un- 
doubted fact ; if we continue to allow the few to 
fatten upon the many and dictate the conditions of 
life to all, we must inevitably balance this injustice 
with the other injustice of prescribing to men how 
and when they shall labor ; we must substitute our 
own crude efforts to distribute rewards for the 
unerring justice of nature, who never fails to duly 
apportion results to efforts when we do not inter- 
fere, and who has sufficient employment for all if 
only we do not deny our brothers' access to her. 



QUESTIONS OF THE DAY 



19— The History of the Present Tariff. By F. W. Taussig. Octavo, 
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21 — The Solution of the Mormon Problem. By Capt. John Codman. 
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Ociavo, paper, illustrated ....... 50 

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33 — The Physics and Metaphysics of Money. By Rodmond 
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35— Unwise Laws. By Lewis H. Blair. Octavo, cloth, 1 00 

36 — Railway Practice. By E. Porter Alexander. Octavo, cloth, 75 

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Henry Hitchcock, LL.D. Octavo, cloth ... 75 

38 — The Inter-State Commerce Act : An Analysis of Its Provisions. 
By John R. Dos Passos. Octavo, cloth . . . .125 

39— Federal Taxation and State Expenses; or, An Analysis of a 
County Tax-List. By W. II. Jones. Ociavo, cloth . . 1 00 

40 — The Margin of Profits : How Profits are now Divided ; What Part 
of the Present Hours of Labor can now be Spared. By Edward 
Atkinson. Together with the Reply of E. M. Chamberlain, Rep- 
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41 — The Fishery Question. A Summary of Its History and Analysis 
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Map of ihe Fishing-Grounds. ....... 75 

42 — Bodyke : A Chapter in the History of Irish Landlordism. By 
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Bowkf.r. Octavo, paper ....... 25 

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MoORE. Octavo, paper ....... 25 

51 — An" rican Prisons in the Tenth United States Census. By 
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